Thoughts on systems and organizations

Transforming home care in Finland?

As a part of our research project described earlier (in this post), we hope to act as a catalyst for change within Finnish home care industry. Home care in Finland suffers from the problem of limited nursing resources and increasing number of (mainly elderly) patients, which currently manifest themselves in low satisfaction among both patients and nurses.

We are now meeting with dozens of companies providing home care (ranging from the very small to the very large), to highlight a way to do things differently: the Buurtzorg model that has been successfully applied in the Netherlands. Buurtzorg has implemented a non-hierarchical leadership model built around self-organizing nurse teams supported by a very lean central HQ. Since their founding in 2006, they have scaled to ~8000 nurses today. Both patients and nurses report increased satisfaction, and the efficiency has skyrocketed as well. For more information, check out e.g., this case study.

We are finding that the idea of letting go of hierarchy, having self-organizing nurse teams, truly embracing the customer context (not optimizing minutes per visit, but customer health and social connections) and fast scaling of the business as done by Buurtzorg sound attractive to the companies we are talking with.

Implementing this model at scale (in home care and beyond) in Finland could provide efficiency gains well above those that any structural solutions (e.g., SOTE) could bring. When treated holistically and with respect using the Buurtzorg approach, patients need less hours of care in total and are less likely to need expensive hospital care.